Asia-Pacific real asset manager ESR Group has entered India’s data centre market with a strategic investment of approximately Rs 900 crore to build a hyperscale facility in Navi Mumbai. The project, located in the Rabale area, marks the company’s first data centre development in the country and reflects growing investor confidence in India’s digital infrastructure sector.

The facility is planned as a multi-storey, high-capacity data centre designed to meet rapidly rising demand for cloud services, artificial intelligence workloads and enterprise data hosting. Industry analysts say the investment underscores the expanding opportunities in India’s data centre ecosystem, driven by digital adoption, data localisation requirements and strong demand from technology and cloud service providers.

The Navi Mumbai data centre will be capable of supporting significant power and network requirements, a key consideration in a market where digital services, connectivity and computational workloads are increasing sharply. The development is poised to enhance India’s digital backbone at a time when the country’s data centre capacity is projected to grow substantially, with key hubs such as Navi Mumbai accounting for a large share of the infrastructure being built.

India’s data centre sector has attracted large capital allocations in recent years as global and domestic players expand operations. The market’s growth is supported by factors including increased enterprise digitisation, regulatory emphasis on local data processing and the proliferation of technologies like AI and 5G. Developers are actively competing to establish scalable infrastructure capable of supporting emerging use cases and future-ready network architectures.

Despite the positive outlook, challenges remain around securing reliable power, high-speed connectivity and land for large-format data centres. Established players and new entrants alike must navigate competitive pressures as investment levels rise and capacity expands. ESR’s move into Navi Mumbai signals a broader trend of institutional capital flowing into India’s digital infrastructure, reinforcing the sector’s strategic importance to the country’s technology-enabled growth story.